BmoreArt

Earlier in the day, the space’s other co-founder, Emi Lynn Holler, had joked that Fruit Camp is “your one-stop body shop,” referencing the fact that although the ground floor houses mainly tattoo stations, the second floor holds several multidisciplinary studios, including two herbalists and a trauma-informed massage therapist and energy worker. Fruit Camp’s collective members also lovingly call each other “campers” over email and text message. The collective has many fond epithets. 

Fruit Camp was founded in 2019 but its roots go back to the Bell Foundry, a cooperatively run arts space in the historic Calvert Street McShane Bell Foundry, a 19th century factory that produced bells and chimes for churches all over the United States. Between 2002 and 2016, the Bell Foundry functioned as a living-and-working space, with studios, a skate park, community garden, print shop, and underground music venue. Holler and McCandlish met while living there, before all the tenants were evicted when the city cracked down on building code violations in local DIY art spaces in the wake of the “Ghost Ship” warehouse fire which killed thirty-six people in Oakland, California. 

While some of Baltimore’s collaborative arts spaces survived this nation-wide wave of closures, the geography of the city’s art scene was forever changed. Holler and McCandlish have no rose-colored nostalgia about the Foundry, though, telling me that many DIY arts spaces were indeed run by “shady” landlords taking advantage of artists trying to make ends meet. However, they knew that when they founded their own space, they wanted to replicate the kind of “density of practice” you find in a DIY space like that, because when you have a lot of people working on all kinds of things it makes the space affordable and exciting. But they also wanted to do this safely and above board.

A friendship and collaboration blossomed when Holler left to pursue a traditional tattoo apprenticeship in Western Massachusetts, leaving McCandlish with their old tattoo machine. The two stayed in touch and when Holler returned from their sojourn up north, Fruit Camp was born. The shop’s moniker comes from a play on all the cruel names they had been called in their queer youth. When you add the sweet and nostalgic word “camp” before the old slur, “fruit,” the name becomes transgressive: an ode to the joy of being a trans owned and community-driven space.

The playfulness of Fruit Camp, however, shouldn’t fool you into thinking there’s a lack of seriousness to the project. Holler and McCandlish have put a lot of thought into how they run the space, both as a collective and as a business. While they’re not officially a non-profit, their goal is to operate on a non-extractive labor model that allows the collective members to control their own working conditions.

All the tattooers and other practitioners are asked to contribute “at cost” to space maintenance but are free to charge clients whatever they like for their services, keeping the entirety of their profits. This is vastly different from the traditional tattoo shop model, in which artists rent a chair and also contribute a portion of their earnings to the owners.

In the spirit of trust, collective members can also paint the walls and decorate in any way they see fit, giving Fruit Camp a kind of maximalist, eclectic vibe. When you walk in, you’re greeted by bubblegum pink bumper stickers that read “I BREAK FOR GAY SLUTS” made by tattooer Sage (who works under the alias Squiggles and Sluts) alongside a bevy of Press Press risograph prints and a mini library of local zines.

The result of this collectivism is that they’re not, as McCandlish mentioned, “the sleekest” shop around. There’s no front desk person taking appointments, for example. And, Holler added, “we ask for a little more self-responsibility” from the artists, who all get a say in any decision-making that would affect them. And this sometimes messy, coalition-building work is all in service of Fruit Camp’s ultimate goal of becoming a worker-owned cooperative, which they hope to achieve this year.

When Holler and McCandlish tell me about their mission, they’re quick to note that “this is not charity” or activism, with which they both have significant experience. (McCandlish is, in fact, currently pursuing a Master’s in Legal and Ethical Studies in order to be better equipped to help with direct actions and jail and prisoner support.) What Fruit Camp is trying to do is reimagine labor through a queer lens. “Queer isn’t just the identities of the people who work here,” McCandlish explains. “It’s also the framework of the space itself.”

In speaking with collective members, this ethic of queer community was woven throughout our conversations. Pili, who is Colombian and of Muisca and Pijao descent, calls their machine and hand-poke tattoo practice “blood tatu portal ceremony” and approaches the work through an Indigenous ceremonial lens. They tell me that the beauty of Fruit Camp is that it is an integrated space, not a “melting pot, which erases our cultures.”

For Luna María Oak, a two-spirit transfemme, tattoo ceremony explores the connection between our ancestors, the land, and our non-human relatives. The flexibility of Fruit Camp allows her to work slowly and intentionally, limiting her number of clients to what her disability allows time and energy for. Her flash—pre-drawn designs clients can pick from for their tattoo—is filled with sweet little creatures and objects from the natural world, found fishing and hunting and walking in the woods around Baltimore.

Sage apprenticed under Luna at Fruit Camp—learning machine tattooing from Holler and McCandlish along the way—in a time when they were building an artistic practice for and by sex workers, while also trying to assemble enough of a safety net to leave their strip club job. Fruit Camp gave them the freedom to explore their own identity as an artist and now they’re flying the coop, headed to New York and eventually London to tattoo. “Fruit Camp was the perfect place to grow up because there’s no shame in being a beginner,” they say, fondly. 

Indeed, almost all the tattooers at Fruit Camp are self-taught. And their apprenticeship model is far gentler than other tattoo shops. Their aim is always “to professionalize with tenderness,” McCandlish said. “Mel-Xóchitl, who operates an Integrative Massage Therapy practice under the name In La K’ech Healing Arts, created a home base at Fruit Camp Studios after graduating massage school from Crestone Healing Arts Center in Colorado.” They told me that the camaraderie at Fruit Camp has allowed them a safer space to build a practice based on shared dedication to personal and communal growth. Her work is trauma-informed, survivor-centered and grounded in the belief that “therapeutic touch is a birthright, not a luxury.”

I found myself skipping out of the shop that cool spring afternoon, after a few hours in the warm embrace of the Fruit Campers, thinking about something Pili said: “Hope is a muscle.” Walking home, I noticed some crocuses and hellebores were starting to bloom, despite the chill, and I realized that spaces like Fruit Camp give me hope that maybe we can collectively reimagine how we live and work to make space for the myriad ways people need and want to move about in the world.

Fruit Camp might be a tattoo shop, but it is one reimagining the ways that work is done to center both community and difference, two things that sometimes seem antithetical but actually exist side-by-side at the center of everything we do.